Peanuts with Cilantro & Scallions

Full of “good fat” and lots of protein, peanuts are a frequently proferred snack in China and a great addition to a vegetarian Chinese meal. They frequently appear as a side dish at my in-laws house, sometimes dressed as in this recipe, and sometimes just fried and salted. This dish can be made spicy or [...]

Anyone live in/near Flushing?

This encouraging article front and center in the New York Times this morning, “Let the Meals Begin,” makes me smile – not only is it refreshing to see some positive coverage of China-related content in the American mainstream media (for its antithesis, check out “Before Guests Arrive, Beijing Hides Some Messes,” redeemed only by reader [...]

Chicken with Cucumbers

This is a fantastic summer dish that is a snap to put together if you have cooked chicken on hand: roasted, rotisserie, poached, braised, grilled, smoked – they’re all good for this. You can also simmer some chicken especially for it. Whatever piece or cooking method you use, I recommend you start with pastured chicken [...]

Simmered Chicken

This is a terrific recipe for a basic cooked chicken – you can serve it warm in its sauce or use it cold for Chinese Chicken Salad (speaking of Con-fusion cuisine!) and as a base for some other cold dishes – see Chicken with Cucumbers – as well as a good picnic food. In China, [...]

Technique: Blanch & Shock

Sounds a bit too much like shock and awe, but this is a method used to precook items (usually vegetables, with the exception of starchy ones, like potatoes) that would not cook through in a quick stirfry, or for when you want to prepare something ahead and quickly finish the cooking later. It’s also a [...]

Marinated Asparagus

Asparagus is available year-round at the conventional stores now, but it’s certainly best in spring and summer and bought from the local farmers’ market – avoid it in other seasons, when it’s likely to have traveled many miles, getting tough, using up fossil fuel, and losing a lot of nutrition along the way. (On this [...]

Stirfried Chinese Spinach (Amaranth)

If your farmers’ market has one or more vendors of Asian vegetables, pay them a visit and just browse the offerings – you may discover a few varieties of greens that you’ve never tried before. One of them, called amaranth or calaloo, is often labeled Chinese Spinach. It has bright green stems and slightly darker [...]

Technique: Roll cutting

This is an interesting technique that is peculiar to Chinese cuisine as far as I know. Its goal is to expose more surface area of a vegetable so that when stirfried, it cooks more quickly. (Unfortunately, it’s sometimes more difficult to pick the chunk up with chopsticks, though!) This method is used to cut long, [...]

Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook

Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province

This is my all-time favorite English-language Chinese cookbook. Written by Fuchsia Dunlop, one of the few (if any other!) non-Chinese people to have attended the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, it contains gorgeous photographs and a wealth of information, from descriptions of ingredients particular to Hunanese cuisine and tools [...]

Menu: “Chinese Bacon & Eggs”

This is a great quick supper to make – with minimal skill and a bit of planning, you can have a meal on the table in the time it takes the rice to cook.
dishes

scrambled eggs & tomatoes
stirfried okra with bacon (or not)
basic steamed rice

strategy

soak the rice
start cooking the rice, and boil water to peel tomatoes
start [...]